Probably the oldest inn of Tewkesbury is the “Berkeley Arms.” There it stands in the High Street, as sturdily as ever, and is in every timber, every casement, and in all the circumstances of uneven flooring and tortuous stairways, so indubitably ancient that men who fought on Yorkist or Lancastrian side in those contested meads by Severn and Avon in 1471 may well have slept beneath its roof the night before the battle, and considered the place, even then, “old-fashioned.” Its age is so evident that for the sign to proclaim it, as it does, in the modern pseudo-antique Wardour Street style, “Ye olde Berkeley Arms,” is an impertinent inadequacy, comparable to calling the Pyramids “large” or the Alps “hills.” It is much the same tale with the “Wheatsheaf”; a little less hoary, perhaps, and certainly more susceptible to pictorial treatment. It latterly has become “Ye,” instead of “The,” Wheatsheaf, and has assumed a redundant “e” or so; but the equally old neighbouring “Black Bear” fairly revels in the antique, and on a quite new sign-board proclaims itself to be “Ye Olde Blacke Beare.” What a prodigal and immoral consumption of that already poor, overworked letter “e,” already, as every compositor working at case knows, the greatest in demand of all the twenty-six letters of the alphabet! Among the various inns mentioned in Thomas Hardy’s novels, the “White Horse” at Maiden Newton was exceptionally picturesque. “Was,” and is not, for already, in the little while between the writing of _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ and now, that fine old stone hostelry of the seventeenth century has been pulled down, to make way for a smart new red-brick house, all show and glitter. The old house was the original of the inn at “Chalk-Newton,” where Tess breakfasted, on the way to Flintcomb Ash. The “Carnarvon Arms,” Bloomsbury, in Besant and Rice’s _Golden Butterfly_, to which the dog “Cæsar” leads Phillis so early in the morning, is the “Guildford Arms,” at the corner of Guildford and Brunswick Streets: “The door ... hung half open by means of a leathern strap.... A smell of stale beer and stale tobacco hanging about the room smote her senses, and made her sick and faint.... She was in a tavern--that is, she thought, a ‘place where workmen spend their earnings and leave their families to starve.’” Similarly, the “Birch Tree Tavern,” of the same authors’ _Seamy Side_, is the “Bay Tree,” St. Swithin’s Lane. It is described in those pages as the resort, in the quieter hours of the afternoon, when all the hungry diners were gone, of Mr. Bunter Baker and a coterie of needy company-promoters, always seeking to float impossible companies and impracticable inventions, and so unfortunate as to be, themselves, convinced of the commercial value of their preposterous projects. CHAPTER XVI VISITORS’ BOOKS